BOSTON – Marketers seeking to reach a mass audience often describe connected TV (CTV) as a way to reach an incremental group of consumers who don’t want watch traditional linear TV. However, CTV provides advantages for brands that seek more targeted audiences and want to tell a more complete brand story.
For Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, CTV was compelling because of its popularity among younger consumers with active lifestyles.
“We saw that with our target audience, they definitely were there already,” Grace Smith, manager of digital marketing at Saucony, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “They were consuming digital video, whether that be smaller digital video clips or longer-form content like shows and movies.”
Saucony also ran social media and social video campaigns aiming for consumers in the lower part of the purchase funnel, but was disappointed to see that social media users tended to skip past video ads.
“The struggle we saw with social video is that our average view time was only three seconds,” Smith said.
More Complete Brand Story
The advantage with CTV was in reaching upper-funnel consumers with 15- and 30-second spots, which were in more compact commercial breaks that viewers knew to expect before watching shows. The longer viewing time gave Saucony a chance to tell a more complete brand story.
Saucony worked with digital marketing agency iProspect to develop its strategy, and with video ad-tech startup Pixability to refine its targeting on CTV platforms such as YouTube, Roku and Amazon Fire.
“Pixability was just above and beyond. Their targeting capabilities, the addition of brand studies to get more data beyond click-through rates [and] completion rates,” Smith said. “They had access to a ton of additional studies and data beyond the front-end media, which was really important to us, too.”
As viewers spent more time consuming media on CTV platforms while stuck at home during the pandemic, Saucony was able to reach new customers. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were new customers, Smith said.
“Purchase intent was a big needle we wanted to move. From a results perspective, we saw a pretty big purchase consideration lift in both YouTube and Roku users,” she said. “With Amazon Fire users, we saw that we moved the needle on purchase intent, but also were able to bring in new buyers to the brand.”
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